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<p id="slogan">A <em>network</em> for families in British Columbia that
have <em>adopted</em> children from China.</p>

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<h2>Jane Brown - Response to Executive Concerns</h2>
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<p>Hello David,</p>


<p>I would be more than happy to share more about what I am doing with
Playshops-- my children's workshops, as you've requested. I would also
be very happy to offer this in your area. If after you read through
this, you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact me for
further information. If you know that you are interested in planning a
Playshop event, it would probably be a good idea to propose several
dates to me, as I am being invited to present them quite often and need
advance notice to be able to make a committment to a group. To contact
me directly, my telephone number is: (480)&nbsp;451-9831.</p>

<p>For as long as I have been a part of the adoption community, adoptive
parents have been building and participating in support groups. Although
parents often discuss how they feel and think as members of adoptive
families while they socialize with each other, their children rarely if
ever talk with each other about adoption or growing up adopted on their
own. They are extremely curious about what other adoptees think, feel,
wonder about, etc.. but have no way to know and have no way to assess
whether they are "normal". Thus, they can tend to feel isolated even if
they have siblings who are also adopted. Most cope by suppressing and
denying any interest in talking about adoption. Many adult adoptees have
shared how lonely that was for them and how their way was fraught with
feelings of sadness, differentness, anger, shame, and awkwardness
because they were certain they were naughty and ungrateful for thinking
about adoption. Most express the wish that they could have had the
support of friends who had also joined their families by way of adoption
so that they would have known that they were normal, healthy people who
had a good future ahead. It was not enough for them to hear this from
their parents because they knew that their parents had not grown up
adopted or racially different from their parents, extended families, and
most of their peers and really could not fully understand their issues
and concerns.</p>

<p>Children learn well in groups-- and they start to draw closer and
closer to their peers as they strive for more independence from their
parents, so group educational experiences are a natural. That means that
what they learn and teach each other in childrens' groups can reinforce
what they are learning at home with their parents about what it means to
be growing up adopted and what it is like to have been transracially
and/or internationally adopted. Groups take the burden off of the
individual child. He/she can hear what others have to say, choose to
share or not share an individual experience or opinion, and participate
regardless of whether choosing to speak or remain silent. It is much
easier for a child to reveal feelings, especially difficult or confusing
ones if someone else, similar in age and living with similar
circumstances shares too. It is always comforting to have someone be
able to empathize because they have "been there" --very different from
only having others be able to sympathize.</p>

<p>With this in mind, I designed workshops-- actually Playshops-- to
enable children to explore together what it means to grow up as adoptees
and what it means to be a person of color in a mostly-caucasian oriented
society. The Playshops are open to young adoptees whether they were
adopted domestically or inernationally, into same-race families or
transracially, and to their non-adopted siblings who also need help
exploring what adoption is all about and what it means in their lives to
be part of an adoptive family. While I did not originally intend
specifically for the Playshops to be therapeutic, they are. They
proactively teach children skills for dealing with societal
misperceptions about adoption and race; and help them to better
integrate what we need and want them to know or think and feel about
being members of adoptive families. Those who attend seem to be able to
transfer the skills they learn in Playshops to settings in which they
are mostly with non-adopted peers. They also seem to be more open with
their parents and to know better how to articulate their thoughts and
feelings with their parents after having participated in these group
experiences. The Playshops help adopted and non-adopted siblings to
understand each other better and to have empathy with their sibling's
sometimes complicated role as a member of their family.</p>

<p>The Playshop sessions are comprised of multi-sensory activities. We
engage in creative movement, plays, drawing, writing, talking,
tug-o-wars (tug-o-feelings). We pour water, we stick and unstick labels
onto people. We work with all sorts of props-- from puppets, to jelly
beans, to braiding yarn, to cups of water, to eggs (and all sorts of
other things). That is how children take in and process information
best-- through their senses. Different children learn in different ways,
so the activities emcompass all sorts of sensory experiences that are
fun and help them to access their creativity, plus broaden their
knowlege.</p>

<p>I always ask support groups to help me to find a young adult adoptee
to help facilitate the groups. Its terrific when we can match the adult
adoptee to the children in terms of race and gender, but not absolutely
necessary. It is,however, important to find an adoptee of color if the
children or some of the children have been adopted transracially. The
children learn a great deal from seeing, hearing from, and interacting
with that individual. (i.e. Did you know that someone could be a
grown-up and STILL be adopted???-- most children don't know that). Or I
can spontaneously ask the young adult adoptee if she was asked questions
about being adopted when she was young-- and whether people still ask,
now that she is grown up. I interview the teen or adult adoptee to make
sure that they are appropriate and positive role models for the
children-- someone they can look up to and hope to be like when they are
grown or nearly grown. Because our children cannot look to us for clues
as to what they will be like when they are adults in exactly the same
way that their non-adopted peers or siblings can look to their parents,
our children really benefit from having these role models in their
lives. Being amongst people with whom they share ethnicity is also
important, but there is a special connection that children usually make
with a teen/young adult adoptee that is magic!</p>

<p>There are several goals for the Playshops. One is to encourage the
children to deepen their understanding of adoption amongst their adopted
peers. Another is to offer them a model of an older person who grew up
adopted and is happy, successful, and interesting-- but who is still
thinking about being an adoptee sometimes. Another is to arm them with
skills that they will need to contend with stereotypes about adoption or
race in a mostly non-adopted and Caucasian-dominated society. Another is
to build and utilize a network-- to talk and share with each other AND
to talk more openly with their parents.</p>

<p>I have worked with adoption support groups designed to serve children
who've come from the same country or with adoptive parent groups who
have networked with other adoption support groups so that the children
who attend the workshop are of many different races and ethnicities.
Both types of groups work well. Children get different things from each
of those types.</p>

<p>When all of the children are of one ethnicity or country, we focus in
on what typically happens in adoptions from that country and issues
pertaining specifically to that. We might, for example, in a group of
Chinese-born children hint at gender issues in that we might practise
becoming Junior Woman (peaceful)Warriors (although I have had groups of
all girls with one or two boys and then need to modify). In a group of
AA (mostly) transracially adopted children, we might focus in on
transitions from birth families to foster homes to adoption and on the
stereotypes people face over race.</p>

<p>When the group is mixed, we can look at different type of adoptions--
children who were in foster homes or orphanages, traditional adoptions
or those in which children know their birth parents, adoptions in which
some children know lots about their birth history and others know little
or nothing. We can also explore diversity a bit differently.</p>

<p>I work with children who are age five and older. I divide the
children in age appropriate groupings (varies from group to group. For
example, when I worked with FCC in San Francisco, the oldest children
were eight and nine and there were only three of four over the age of
eight, but in Sacramento, there are children up to the age of twelve
since their workshop was open to families who have adopted from a
variety of countries). I try to keep the numbers down-- no more than
fifteen to twenty in a group. Twenty five-year-olds are LOTS to manage--
and when the groups are too big, the children can't get as much out of
them and I am less able to focus on individual children along with the
group as a whole. I'd prefer to limit the five's to no more than fifteen
to a group. If the group gets larger than that, I request that the
adoptive family support group or agency find at least one more
teen/adult adoptee to help. Twenty children age seven through nine or a
few more than twenty children age ten+, though, is not a problem because
their attention span is greater, their desire to be in close proximity
to mom is not as great, and their interest level is high.</p>

<p>In the follow-up session, a Parents' Wrap-Up, I share what the
specific activities were that the children had been engaged in, what
parents might expect over the next few days and weeks as far as how much
their children might tend to tell about what they did, and how parents
can and should respond to encourage their children to keep talking. I do
not, though, share about what individual children said or did during the
sessions since I could not possibly remember what each said/did and the
children need to know that they have a little privacy (that everything
won't be reported). I do though, make sure I knew a child's name and
find and talk to their parent, if I had a concern about a specific
child. That has never happened, but there could always be a first time.
</p>

<p>So far, wherever I have presented the Playshops, they have filled
very quickly. There has always been a waiting list. The feedback has
been overwhelmingly positive so that I have been asked to return to do
more whenever I present the Playshops. Most of my adult workshops are
now filled to capacity too because I think that groups are eager for
educational experiences. I have been on the adoption speakers' circuit
for many years, so I now have a pretty good idea what adoptive parents
need and want to hear about, I think. It helps that I am an adoptive mom
and understand adoption from that perspective. It also helps that I have
had pretty broad experience in the adoption community, too. I've been
blessed to have been in the right place at just the right time to be
able to learn and understand the difference in perspective amongst the
members of the adoption triad (adoptive parents-- birth parents--
adoptees).</p>

<p>When groups are interested in having me come, I help them consider
how to make it possible. I consider that part of the job! My airfare and
fee has to be covered, so I've worked out with groups how they can make
sure that they can pay for these things, the room, any supplies
(negligible in cost), etc. and come out at least a little ahead. I work
with them on creating advertisement fliers, so that families understand
what their children will get out of the experience. FCC-San Francisco
and FCC-Portland, Oregon would be groups to contact to find out how they
did this and whether it was worthwhile.</p>

<p>One of the best ways to make sure that expenses are covered and that
there is adequate help to plan an event like this is to network with
other adoptive parent support groups and to ask local agencies to help
sponsor it. Also, adoption organizations like NACAC will often be
willing to help sponsor educational events and some corporations (i.e.
Toys "R Us) offer grants for parenting groups and organizations that
would enable them to offer an educational event for parents. Some groups
have successfully written grant proposals to obtain funding to be able
to bring Playshops to their area. I work in many arenas in the adoption
community. I have children who were born in Korea and China and have
also adopted a teen through the U.S. Special Needs program. I have
placed children from those countries and many others. I have worked in
both international and U.S. adoption so agencies usually know that I can
provide experiences for children no matter where they were born and
adopted.</p>

<p>Go back to the <a href="index.htm">Jane Brown archive</a>.</p>

<p class="fineprint">Jane Brown is both an adoption social
worker/educator and an adoptive &amp; foster mother of nine children,
some of whom are now grown. She lives and works in Arizona. She serves
on the editorial board of Adoptive Families Magazine and writes a
regular parenting column for the publication. She is the creator of
Adoptive Playshops which is a series of workshops for adopted children
age five+, their non-adopted siblings, and adoptive parents in which
children are helped through playful, multisensory activities to explore
growing up in an adoptive family and racial identity, plus develop
skills for dealing with societal attitudes and beliefs about adoption
and includes helping children resist and confront racism and bullying.
She can be reached at: janebrown77@earthlink.net or at: (602) 690-5338.</p>

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